Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man

by Hindle, Andrew

  “Right,” Whye replied. “We didn’t dive, but turning off the machine didn’t seem to do anything to change the conditions.”

  “And destroying the machine probably wouldn’t either,” Clue concluded. “It’d break the gate, not close it – like Janus said.”

  “There’s also the chance that this will make the whole problem way, way worse,” Sally said. “Without anything left on this side, we might stop diving. If something’s coming up from the other side, at least there wouldn’t be a machine on this side for it to connect to. Or a machine on that side for it to ride in on.”

  “Also true,” Z-Lin admitted. “I don’t think any of us should go around claiming we have a damn clue what’s going on here.”

  “Not even me,” Bruce said jovially, “but it seems like the best shot.”

  “Assuming, like you said before, that you’re not just saying all this because you want to continue whatever insane thing the Artist was trying to do,” Sally pointed out.

  “Yes,” Bruce conceded blandly, “assuming that.”

  “If there is something on that side coming up, it doesn’t matter if there’s a machine on this side or not, it’ll come up anyway,” Decay said, “at least if what Bruce is saying happens to be true, and what we’ve witnessed with the eejits means what we’re blindly theorising it does. And from what we’ve seen, we – that is, the agencies in this universe who operate the underspace drive machinery – are losing control of the dive function anyway.”

  “Just because it seemed to activate last time without anyone doing anything,” Janya said, “doesn’t mean the Artist was keeping it from happening and his death set the whole thing in motion and we’re losing control more and more. It seems likely, but it’s by no means the only possibility. I’m just saying. I tend to agree with the plan as presented, but have to acknowledge that there are other possibilities. For all we know, we dived because Bruce – who is connected to the drive directly via the damn scooter that his hub’s built into – made us dive.”

  “True,” Bruce remarked.

  “Bruce would you shut up?” Clue snapped.

  “Sorry.”

  “And the only way to stop it is from over there,” Decay went on, ignoring this, “again, apparently. And again, with due consideration for the fact that there is no literal ‘over there’. And this seems to be the only way to do it. Believe me, I’d feel better if we were sending people we trusted as well, but it’s a one-way trip – if all goes according to plan,” he paused. “Which is beyond dubious,” he added, “since I haven’t understood a damn thing about what’s going on since basically the first dive, and we’re now talking about acting on the advice of a synthetic intelligence we’re all pretty sure is insane.”

  “If it fails, then we’ve tried and failed,” Clue said firmly. “If we destroy the machinery and that fails, we’ve lost our quite-possibly-illusory-anyway options. Simple risk assessment.”

  “If we destroy all the equipment and the problem continues, at least if Bruce was still here it might have the knowledge required to design or print off components for a new drive,” Janya suggested.

  “Oh ho ho, no chance,” Bruce said. “I’m intelligent and have high information retention, but you should see those things. I swear the Artist was feeding his soul into it, and half the schematics were inside his head.”

  “We would definitely have found them,” Decay remarked.

  “Nice,” Bruce congratulated the Blaran dryly.

  “So,” Sally said unwillingly, “you go in there. And we wait out here. And hope for the best.”

  “Just like always,” Janya said.

  “And I have to go deep,” Bruce said. “As deep and as far as I can go, in whatever sense that idea is applicable to the underspace. A shallow dive, a part-immersion, won’t cut it. I’ve got to go all the way in.”

  “Into the … darkestness?” Whye suggested.

  “Ugh, you had to say it,” Sally growled.

  JANYA

  The goodbyes between Bruce and the crew of Astro Tramp 400 were brief and not overly emotional, somewhat tainted by the fact that they all overwhelmingly failed to trust the synthetic intelligence or a single one of its motives or statements, and were all reasonably certain it was leading them into some fate worse than death. About the only person who seemed in any danger of choking up was Waffa.

  “We’ll get your mainframe fixed up and then hook you up with a new hub,” he said, sounding for all the world like a mother sending her only child off to Little Astro camp for the first time, “and you’ll be right as rain. This busted hub will be gone and you’ll be back, good as new.”

  “Sure I will, mate,” Bruce said, awkwardly reassuring and very plainly embarrassed. “Sure I will.”

  They’d moved the whole assemblage out of the passage near the recycling station and back into the docking bay on that level, providing Bruce with a wide clear space under the blister windows to perform its final dive. Glomulus Cratch, with official permission to leave the medical bay and by common agreement from the crew, was standing beside the scooter and replacing the sterile-wrapped pieces of the Artist as best he could into their proper places. Zeegon, just having finished disconnecting the drive, had ceremoniously and mostly-uncomplainingly reconnected it.

  “Are you sure you don’t need to be at a safe distance outside the ship or anything?” Sally asked.

  “Nah,” Bruce said. “There’s no space or time or anything, remember? Wherever I am while I’m up here is irrelevant.”

  “Right,” she muttered, “forgot about there not being any space or time or anything.”

  “Presumably, though,” Janya said, “you can control the extent of the … what, the bubble that forms around the drive and drops its volume into the underspace. Sorry, I’m still sort of thinking in terms of relative fields.”

  “Yeah,” Bruce said, “it’s a bit more wacky than that but you’ve got the general gist of it. If all I want to take with me is the scooter, then that’s what goes. It’s taking more than about the volume of the Tramp with me that was a bit of a challenge. We were working on that.”

  They’d decided to keep the Jauren Silvan weasel, which they’d informally named Boonie. It hadn’t seemed to have suffered any adverse or lingering effects from touching the blob of darkerness, any more than the rest of them had from travelling through the underspace itself. It didn’t, according to Bruce, constitute a ‘gate’ and their cringe-inducingly unscientific ‘does this weasel seem spooky to you?’ tests with a couple of the ship’s eejits seemed to bear this out. It would, furthermore, be cruel and unnecessary to leave it behind down there just because Bruce was staying.

  As a result, the sample box was rattling and thumping on the floor by Sally’s feet. Janya had tried to pass off the responsibility of fixing up a more appropriate habitat for Boonie and ascertaining how they might best keep it alive – if that was even possible – but so far the only other volunteer was Zeegon and he wanted to drop the weasel into the nearest airlock. If it happened to be a malfunctioning airlock, that was messy and sad but ultimately not a matter of concern.

  “There we go,” Cratch said, lifting what looked like – yes, the legs and lower body of the dead Molran, swathed and hidden in wrappings, the remains of his clothes, and the sterilising sealant they’d coated everything in before leaving the medical bay. He raised the enormously heavy, already-stiffening mass of bone and sinew, folded it by the knees over his arm, and angled it awkwardly into the vehicle, like he was tucking half of a giant child into bed.

  Janya wondered why she had pictured it in precisely those terms, and felt a moment of regret that she couldn’t go back and not do so.

  “I guess that’s me ready to go,” Bruce said.

  The entire contraption, the technological space-centaur with the now-dead organic heart, seemed to Janya’s eyes that much more poignantly dynamic, alive, because of the perceived housing of Bruce’s consciousness within it. In defiance of the aforementio
ned organic matter, indeed, it seemed to pulse. It sat in the middle of the docking bay, slanted against the floor on its slightly-broken support struts and the curved bulk of its conventional drive components, and the crew stood before it nervously while Glomulus finished pushing and flopping the wrapped carcass-pieces in place and Zeegon checked the whole apparatus over – totally unnecessarily – for safety and spaceworthiness.

  “You don’t think it’s ghoulish, do you?” Waffa asked without hope, as Cratch finished his task and stepped back, peeling away his sterile membranes and dusting off his hands delicately but with his usual ostentation. The scooter-suit obediently eased closed, grinding slightly at the end of its sequence as over-stressed parts failed to mesh quite as perfectly as they had before – but the whole thing did close up tight.

  “What,” Z-Lin said. “Sealing up a dismembered Molran corpse with organs apparently composed of anti-universe matter into an EVA suit and sending it into a potentially new frontier of reality for all eternity, in the company of a severely-damaged synthetic intelligence hub with the intention of guaranteeing none of it ever comes back to haunt us? Yes, Waff, it’s pretty damn ghoulish.”

  “You’ll be okay,” Waffa said again. “You’ll … I don’t know what it’ll be like, but you’ll…”

  “When the dive occurs and the Tramp stays here,” Bruce said, “I’ll disconnect. The part of me in this universe will go serenely and involuntarily into standby, and the part of me in the underspace will go back to just being a hub, albeit with the mission parameters we’ve programmed into the scooter’s computer core to allow me to fulfil my mission. I literally won’t know what’s happened to myself, in either place. The hub won’t be me. I will be here – like you say, waiting for you guys to fix me.”

  Waffa looked at Clue, then at Janya, with a weird sort of agony on his face. “This is a sentient being,” he said, “and arguably mentally handicapped due to damage and … and whatever, contamination. It can’t be held responsible for its actions and it can’t be deemed capable of making this sort of decision.”

  “Waffa, it’s okay,” Bruce said. “You know this is the only choice.”

  “Can’t you just program the drive, and the scooter, to go down there and deliver a message or something, and not dive back up?” Waffa asked. “I mean, there are – you’ve – Bruce has got some problems, but the active synthetic intelligence is still more useful to us than just the computer,” he said, turning to the Commander again. “We’re undermanned and running with heavy damage and we don’t have much in the way of crew expertise. This just seems like throwing away resources.”

  “We were already working without those resources, though,” Z-Lin said, “although I suppose I’d have to admit that ‘muddling through’ might be a better phrase than ‘working’, and even ‘muddling through’ is a bit over-optimistic.”

  “I don’t know,” Contro, who until now had stood in the faintly-smiling silence Janya was accustomed to seeing on his face when things beyond his understanding were happening, spoke up. “We’re nothing if not a muddle, right?”

  “Damn skippy,” Cratch said.

  “And this hub, and all this technology from the Boonie and the Artist,” Z-Lin said, “it’s hazardous. If we don’t destroy it outright, sending it into the underspace is the only way. We’ve done this conversation,” she sighed. “It was only a conversation in the first place because the chain of command is so unutterably be-arseholed.”

  “Of course, not to exacerbate things, but … we haven’t dived again in a while, regardless of whether the drive was offline or online,” Janya said hesitantly. “If we waited, and studied this whole situation more, we might find some solution that didn’t involve sacrificing somebody.”

  “No, I think I’d rather go,” Bruce said, suddenly sombre. “I should … you know, warn them.”

  “Warn who about what?” Clue asked.

  “About you,” Bruce said, its voice small and lost and afraid.

  The crew exchanged glances.

  “Are you serious right now?” Z-Lin asked.

  “What happened to you guys? The Boonie, the Artist’s body, all of this. I’m sure you weren’t like this before, the last time I came off standby when the Dark Glory Ascendant was in the neighbourhood. Was it their fault? When did you get so violent?”

  “It was the Rip who cut up the Artist,” Waffa pointed at the ship’s medic.

  “That was an autopsy,” Glomulus protested, his face amused as it usually was when someone accidentally used his crew-only nickname in front of him. “After he tried to cut off my wossnames with a scalpel.”

  “Hang on, Mister Suddenly-Boo-Hoo-You-Humans-Are-So-Nasty,” Sally interrupted the incipient debate, “who was it who chewed up an eejit and sprayed him into space?”

  “Let’s not get hung up on who chewed up what and spat it into space,” Bruce said defensively. “The point is, whatever-it-is in the underspace has just as much to fear from a merging with this universe as you do from a merging with the darkerness. Just because we don’t understand that side, don’t pretend it’s all one way.”

  “That’s nothing like what it sounded like you were saying a second ago,” Sally accused.

  “Hey,” Bruce snapped, “if I can’t philosophise about the ills of humanity in my final moments before sacrificing myself for the good of same, what’s the point? And besides,” it went on in a tone of injured dignity, “I acted with extreme prejudice in order to protect you from worse. And because of the hub’s exposure to the underspace. And because I’d taken damage in the first place. Are you saying you guys are the way you are because The Accident hit you in the same way it hit me, and the able fabricator, and the - ?” it snapped to an obviously-indignant stop. “Is that what you’re saying? You’re damaged components?”

  “No,” Clue admitted, “we’re just up against it.”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Bruce said, “as an excuse it would certainly have novelty value–”

  “Are you leaving or not?” Janya asked.

  “Fine.”

  Bruce fell into a seething silence, and a small blue-green light came on halfway down the barrel of the scooter. That was all.

  “Understated,” Cratch approved.

  “I sort of thought there’d be a wobbly swirly blob that would appear out of nowhere and the whole scooter would sort of pop out of existence,” Sally remarked.

  “Um,” Zeegon said, and pointed. Janya and the others turned and looked.

  The darkerness washed in against the windows, and the Tramp dived.

  ZEEGON

  The ship shuddered, then groaned. Groaning was a new one, Zeegon thought. It added to the impression that they were sinking beneath the surface of some heavy, smothering liquid, some dense substance that was squeezing the Tramp, crushing her.

  Except that wasn’t really what was happening. It was just what it seemed like, because what was really happening was too impossible for comprehension. The Tramp, and everything aboard, was sinking into a universe in which spatial existence, time and distance and mass, had never existed, and there was only one way a multi-dimensional object could fit itself into that set of parameters. And so the Tramp shed dimensions, sloughed off causality and duration and atomic mass, and basically peeled away the skin of her own reality in a futile attempt to fit into a new one.

  But that wasn’t something the brain could process, wasn’t something that worked on a fundamental level, and so the very nature of what was happening translated itself.

  The darkerness fell over them, deepened relentlessly. It sank in through the docking blister, the little slice of space that had been visible through the windows swimming out of sight and being replaced by the overactive, overenthusiastic, overcompensating nothingness of the underspace. Deeper, and deeper, and heavier. The shuddering grew more pronounced, and then there was a mighty BDANG and the entire ship lurched and dropped. It was as though the Tramp had fallen onto an underwater ledge, and then the ledge had collap
sed underneath them and they’d dropped another fifty feet, buckling and twisting. Everyone, even Decay, tumbled to the trembling, thrumming floor.

  And that was when Zeegon felt it.

  It wasn’t consciousness and it certainly wasn’t corporeal. It wasn’t anything, really, and that made it extremely difficult to explain, difficult to quantify or to recall after the fact. Difficult to even experience. The brain simply didn’t process it in any meaningful way. But, in direct contradiction of everything the human brain had evolved to believe, in defiance of every sensory assumption, it still happened.

  The darkerness looked into them, into them all, looked into every molecule and particle and wave and string of this baffling, bewitching, terrifying stuff that had extruded into its universe.

  It looked, and it weighed, and if it had had a pen, it probably would have had a good poke.

  Zeegon pushed himself up onto his elbows, and looked around to see the rest of the crew similarly struggling. The floor was vibrating heavily and giving an occasional jolt that made it difficult to regain balance, and so far only Decay was on his feet. The Blaran reached down and helped the Commander to rise.

  Sally was lying on her stomach, holding the box with Boonie inside it to keep it from bouncing around too severely, and staring with fixed, Sallyesque determination at the nothingness welling up around them. In a moment of transcendent fellow-organism feeling, Zeegon elbow-crawled across to the Chief Tactical Officer, pried open the box before she could do more than widen her eyes at him, and let Boonie scuttle up his arm. Unlike during the post-launch zero-gravity on board the lander, when the sleek, powerful little creature had been spooked almost out of its mind, now it seemed relatively calm. Perhaps the esoteric nature of the underspace’s menace was lost on a space weasel, Zeegon mused. Or a jungle weasel, or whatever Boonie was.

  You’re a space weasel now, he thought disjointedly.

  The good news was, Boonie didn’t scratch the shooey out of him, and seemed calm and happy in his presence – reassured by it, in fact. And Zeegon, in turn, felt reassured by the weasel’s claws lightly gripping his shoulder through his uniform.